There are only 80 million Germans here, by the way. Tendenz sinkend (going down). But don’t mind them. They’re on their way out for a reason. I don’t know what it is but there must be some reason they’re on their way out.

More than half of residents living in the German city of Frankfurt have a migrant background, according to new statistics. Figures show 51.2 per cent of people living there are either non-German, German citizens born abroad or Germans who are the children of immigrants.

Distraught by her countrywomen’s rotten reproduction record, childless German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called an emergency demography strategy summit in Berlin.

“What’s with these Luschen (duds)?” The cranky chancellor asked her clueless ministers. “I mean, this isn’t rocket science we’re talking about here. Don’t they, you know, show them films and stuff at school about this, you know, kind of thing? Even I’ve seen films like that, you know. Once, I think.”

I think Germany is below average in terms of the help provided to young people. And Germany is certainly below average in the attitude that women with children should not work. In most countries it was like that 50 years ago but not today. That is just very detrimental to fertility.

Within the next 45 years, the nation’s population will decline by at least 10 percent — whereas most countries, including the United States, expect the opposite to happen. Some consider that dynamic to be the driving force behind Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to take in nearly 1 million refugees this year alone.

A new study has determined that Germany not only has the lowest birth rate in Europe, it has the lowest birth rate on Planet Earth itself. In the past five years Germany has managed to produce a less than whopping 8.3 children per 1000 inhabitants. That edges the country past the previous Japanese champions who apparently couldn’t keep their hands off each other during the same period and now squeeze out some 8.4 children per 1000 inhabitants.

But what’s this with these .3 and .4 kids, gals?

Meanwhile, in an unrelated story… Another study indicates that Germany will face a massive labor deficit by the year 2030. In a mere 15 years, that is, between 6.1 and 7.8 million workers will be missing in the country.

And it could get worse. Large sections of the German population just disappear out of nowhere here from time to time, too.

Suffering from one of the lowest birth rates in the EU and xenophobic to the core (although officially in denial about this), Germans everywhere (or at least where you can still find them) are puzzled by the continued drop in Germany’s population.

Federal statistics office Destatis said Germany was expected to have between 68 and 73 million inhabitants by 2060, compared to its current 81 million.

I think it’s time for even more concentrated government intervention, don’t you? More sex education efforts, for instance.

The logic appears to go like this: Germans will only have children if they are paid by the state to do so.

That this money must first be taken from them by the state to only later be given back to them if they behave properly (improperly?) is the first oddity here but not really the issue at the moment – or at least not the one German politicians want to talk about. The problem now is that Germans aren’t having enough children (only 12% of families with children here have 3 or more). They are not following the German reproduction regulation logic like they are supposed to and are refusing to have large families despite regular increases to the child benefit or Kindergeld payments given here.

In an attempt to counteract what is now the German one-child-per-family-if-they-have-any-children-at-all tradition, some reproduction regulators are suggesting that families now be given higher payments for each successive child born. I’m sure this will work just great. Well, I’m kind of sure it might work maybe, I mean.

Of course more money will first have to be taken in from the Germans before some of it can be given back to some of them again but that’s never bothered legislators here before so why break with a tradition like that now?

Germans everywhere were stunned this morning to discover that some 1.5 million of their countrymen had inexplicably disappeared the night before.

“This is just plain eerie,” one woman said. “I didn’t know any of them personally or anything of course, but just the thought that you could vanish like that from one day to the next is enough to make a body want to run away and hide first.”

The big shock came right after breakfast when those remaining of the German population were informed by the Federal Statistical Office that Germany now has a population of 80.2 million people rather than the 81.7 million who had been there just a few hours earlier.

Needless to say, the Federal Police and Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service) are working feverously to locate the missing 1.5 million Germans as soon as possible but have not been able to find any hot leads as of yet. They ask that if anyone left in the country should happen to locate this group of missing citizens to please tell them to remain where they are and call the authorities immediately.

Each year, the German government spends billions of euros in an effort to stop the country’s ticking demographic time bomb. By 2050, it is estimated that only 70 million people will be living in the country, down from today’s roughly 82 million. Without a major change in the birthrate or a mass influx of up to 24 million new immigrants, the population could soon begin shrinking, according to United Nations forecasts…

“…Germany underestimated the importance of a culture of welcome and overestimated the attractiveness as a country of immigration,” said Ulrich Kober of the Bertelsmann Foundation which commissioned the study released on Monday.

The country could pay a heavy price for its anti-immigration views as its older workforce dies out, concludes the Foundation. “Highly qualified people from non-EU countries actively avoid moving to Germany,” added Herr Kober.

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
- Frederic Bastiat

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
- Margaret Thatcher

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
- H.L. Mencken

It is like information theory; it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise. The intelligence agencies call it disinformation. If you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone's contact with reality, probably your own included.
- Philip K. Dick

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
- Henry Kissinger

Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

German schadenfreude knows no bounds, particularly when it comes to the United States. The country loves to feel superior to a superpower like America. Yet Germany also harbors a childish infatuation with Obama — one which has little political grounding. The reasons are psychological. …The criticism of America has always been a bit infantile. One is familiar with the theory from psychoanalysis, when people talk about transference, or when suppressed feelings or emotions are overcome by projecting them onto others. It may work for a while, improving one’s feeling of self-worth by devaluing an imagined adversary. But it always falls short. Which is why the ritual must be constantly carried out anew.
- Jan Fleischhauer

Intellectuals, in the words of the writer Eric Hoffer, "cannot operate at room temperature." They are excited by daring opinions, clever theories, sweeping ideologies, and utopian visions of the kind that caused so much trouble during the 20th century. The kind of reason that expands moral sensibilities comes not from grand intellectual "systems" but from the exercise of logic, clarity, objectivity, and proportionality.
- Steven Pinker

The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature... The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period.
- William James

A doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. Once we understand a thing, it is as if it had originated in us. And, clearly, those who are asked to renounce the self and sacrifice it cannot see eternal certitude in anything which originates in that self.
- Eric Hoffer

The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the 'God' of ordinary men, is, both by ordinary men and by philosophers, endowed with certain of those metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on philosophy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of course to be 'one and only' and to be 'infinite'; and the notion of many finite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider, and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism with its mono-ideistic bent, both 'pass to the limit' and identify the something with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows the example which they set.

Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all.- William James